How Stanford’s Black women medical faculty contended with “sticky floors” and “leaky pipelines”

Rebecca Lee Crumpler became America’s first Black woman doctor in 1864. In 1883, she published the first medical book by an African American author. In 1895, she passed away and was buried, apparently, without a headstone. Crumpler languished with little historical documentation until fellow Black women doctors erected a headstone for her in 2020. In her recent Faculty Research Fellows talk, Iris Gibbs, professor of radiation oncology and neurosurgery (by courtesy), credited this story of accomplishment, erasure, and recovery as a core inspiration for her work on the under-documented history of Black women medical faculty.

Alongside her extensive medical research in cancer care and robotic radiosurgery, Gibbs also studies the history of Black women doctors within U.S. academia in general and Stanford in particular. Her research on Black women medical faculty and their history draws on the Clayman Institute’s own archives, historical material in the Lane medical library, and oral histories conducted by Gibbs’ research team. In this research, she demonstrates how structural barriers in medical education and academic hiring led to stark underrepresentation of Black women medical faculty. She observes patterns like “sticky floors” and “leaky pipelines” that disrupt Black women’s path to the professoriate. Beyond revealing these patterns, Gibbs also is working to document the unique contributions of Black women medical faculty.

[W]hen you rely only on transcripts of recorded interviews, you miss a lot. So much as we can, we try to preserve audio, even video…ensuring that the narrators themselves can build a connection with you.

As Gibbs pointed out, the intersecting axes of sexism and anti-Blackness historically have created this underrepresentation. For instance, the influential 1910 Flexner Report advocated for standardized medical education, while Abraham Flexner himself openly pushed for Black students’ exclusion from medical professions. According to Gibbs, “Flexner strongly believed not in the segregation of genders but in the segregation of the races, believing quote, ‘the fewer Black doctors, the better.’”

By the 1970s, Black women were only in the “single digits” in Stanford’s medical professoriate, according to Gibbs’ research. Their representation among doctors generally still trails behind that of white women or Black men. Black women medical faculty experienced the long-lasting effects of structural racism alongside, and compounded with, the professional repression that women of all races were experiencing in the 20th century. Gibbs has documented throughout much of the 20th century most women in medicine at Stanford were hired as “research associates” rather than into the professoriate proper. This research designation very rarely allowed for promotion and denied women doctors, including Black doctors, other benefits like participation in the Faculty Senate. Gibbs describes this phenomenon as a “sticky floor,” in which structural barriers prevented even those doctors who had gained access to Stanford from thriving and rising past this bottom level – this floor – within its limiting clinical structure. In a given year, in fact, “most [women clinical faculty] were either terminated or remained pretty persistently in those ranks…here at Stanford it shows a pretty substantial leakage” in the faculty pipeline that was concentrated among women doctors.

Gibbs documents not only these struggles, but also the triumphant stories that emerge in the face of such structural barriers. One of her findings from archival research, for instance, uncovered the story of Dr. Beatrix Ann McCleary Hamburg, a pediatric psychiatrist and likely the first Black woman on the medical faculty promoted from research associate to the professoriate at Stanford. Gibbs focuses on oral histories, she said, because “when you rely only on transcripts of recorded interviews, you miss a lot. So much as we can, we try to preserve audio, even video…ensuring that the narrators themselves can build a connection with you.” By developing oral histories through interviews, Gibbs is ensuring that not only the historical facts but also the personal expression of the Black women medical faculty she interviews are preserved for future historians. In her research and her oral history work, Gibbs is working hard to make sure that Crumpler’s erasure is never repeated.